Foreword

For much of the profession and research field of peace studies, if I may use a provocative metaphor, we seem stuck in the era of silent films. We have ignored the soundscape, the ever present, surrounding and penetrating presence of vibration within human experience, through which the perceptive, emotional, and interpretive schemes that shape the human search for meaning and response emerge, adapt, and respond. As mentioned in a previous work, Jacques Attali located this issue in a much larger context when he wrote: ‘For twenty-five centuries, Western knowledge has tried to look upon the world. It has failed to understand that the world is not for the beholding. It is for the hearing. It is not legible, but audible’ (2004, 10).

It is not possible to imagine that in the beginning was the word, in whatever specific origin myth or tradition we explore, without the environment of vibration and music. Most traditions believe that all that we have been given and share on our extraordinary living planet began in sound. Research now suggests that music, which I define here as the intentional and shared use of controlled vibration, pre-dated the formal use of language and created the tissue, the glue that made possible the notion of ‘social’ relations. In the most profound sense, the human community paradoxically is held together, and pushed apart, by making sense of our soundscape. From this view, music writ large, evokes, invokes, and provokes, human consonance and dissonance.¹

Music emerges from deep within and seeks to find its way back into a shared world where we as beings in our humanity attempt to make sense of what lies within and around us. Gaynor (1999) noted in his research that sound and vibration interact in a holistic manner with the body. ‘If we accept that sound is vibration, and we know that vibration touches every part of our physical being, then we understand that sound is “heard” not only through our ears but through every cell in our body’ (17). When we approach music and sound, we inquire and look into a phenomenon that penetrates the human experience, sonically, and physically in ways that go beyond mere words.

Based essentially on vibration, music provides a very different kind of medium by which to explore any of the deep human experiences mobilized around conflict and peace. We are in a very real sense made for and from sound. Our earliest experience of life takes place within a womb where we are surrounded by a steady rhythm and sound. Understanding conflict and peace must find ways to account for the elements that go below and beyond the linear modalities of making sense of things as if rational thought can disembody itself from who we are as beings made of sound and vibration.

Without rejecting linearity completely, sound and music provide a metaphoric shift needed to take into account repetition and circularity, allowing us to understand that healing often takes place by a deepening of our connection with the experience of living in the moment, what Morrison calls the ‘eternal now’.² The rhythmic repetition of rituals in the Abrahamic and other religions, the chanting of mantras in Buddhism, all point to a deepening through circling behavior. When violence makes us numb and vibrationless, sound and music often help us reconnect with the essence of our being as vibration, enabling individuals to enter a process of re-humanization essential to rebuild flourishing communities. We need metaphors based on vibration, sound, and music in order to understand the essence of peacebuilding.

Conflict disrupts. It stops our normal process of making sense through accepted and often unquestioned assumptions about what events, people, and issues mean. Whatever the level, conflict opens us up to inquiry. We are faced with a challenge that we must now make sense of because our assumed understanding has been disrupted. Engaging us holistically music is experienced both from within the interior world and through interaction in the social world, and back again. Throughout, we find that the search for understanding and response is embedded and embodied, held in the soundscape of human experience and has both an individual and socially evocative capacity and source.

In this special issue, the authors explore and make the case for music as action, as ‘musicking’ (Small 1998) as response to the challenges of conflict and peacebuilding. The various chapters take on the conceptual challenge based on the mission statement of the Min-On Music Research Institute with its evocative phrase ‘to pursue a multidisciplinary investigation of the potential application of music in peacebuilding activities’ (MOMRI 2016). At essence they seek to elucidate how music and peace action, both those that build toward peace and may mitigate destructive patterns of violence, emerge and change our world.

I return to my earlier proposition: if sound, vibration, music at its earliest, provided the glue of social relations, we must more fully understand how social change and response to deep conflict are not phenomena that sit at the periphery of our conceptual and strategic response, but at the center. The four author’s explorations in this special issue are very much in line with music as vibration and action that underpins the human process of making sense of what are far too often experiences of violence that defy explanation and guide the process through which social action mobilizes. They provide and trace the thread of this understanding through a critical literature review, formulate a statement of value, and provide fresh insights regarding how music studies, when informed by the fields of education, ethnography, and ecological thinking, can contribute to the landscape of social change.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. I have written extensively about this in two recent publications that I draw on here for this foreword, first from the chapter titled ‘Following the healing muse’ in When Blood and Bones Cry Out: Journeys through the Soundscape of Healing and Reconciliation (Lederach and Lederach 2010, Oxford University Press); and more recently Arts and Peacebuilding, introduction to the music section of the book (forthcoming).

2. For a full exploration of this concept see Lederach and Lederach (2010, 134).